Certainly, there could not have been a more marked contrast than between him and his successor. Martin Gurwood was a man of six-and-twenty, unmarried, with apparently no thought in life beyond his sacred calling and the duties appertaining to it. Only half the rooms in the vicarage were furnished; and, except on such rare occasions as his mother or some of his friends coming to stay with him, only two of them on the ground-floor, one the vicar's study, the other his bed-chamber, were used. The persistent entreaties of his old housekeeper had induced him to relent from his original intention of allowing the garden to go to rack and ruin, and it was accordingly handed over to the sexton, who in so small a community had but little work in his own particular line, and who kept up the old-fashioned flowers and the smooth-shaven lawns in which their late owner had so much delighted. But Martin Gurwood took no interest in the garden himself, and only entered it occasionally of an evening, when he would stroll up and down the lawn, or one of the gravel walks, with his head bent forward and his hands clasped behind him, deep in meditation. He kept a horse, certainly--a powerful big-boned Irish hunter--but he only rode her by fits and starts, sometimes leaving her in the stable for weeks together, dependent on such exercise as she could obtain in the spare moments of her groom, at other times persistently riding her day after day, no matter what might be the weather. On those occasions the vicar did not merely go out for a mild constitutional, to potter round the outskirts of his parish, or to trot over to the market-town; he was out for hours at a stretch, and generally brought the mare home heated and foam-flecked. Indeed, more than one of his parishioners had seen their spiritual guide riding across country, solitary indeed, but straight, as though he were marking out the line for a steeple-chase, stopping neither for hedge, bank, nor brook, the Irish mare flying all in her stride, her rider sitting with his hands down on her withers, his lips compressed, and his face deadly pale. "Tekkin it out of hisself, mebbe," said Farmer Barford, when his son described to him this sight which he had seen that afternoon; "for all he's so close, and so meek and religious, there's a spice of the devil in him as in every other man; and, Bill, my boy, that's the way he takes it out of hisself." Thus Farmer Barford, and to this effect spoke several of the parishioners in committee assembled over their pipes and beer at the Dun Cow.